Weather forecasts. Election ‘projections’. Economic indicators. Terror threat levels.
Just a few of the ways that humans try and see into the future. Try to take on that which only God is able to do. But, we are masters of our universe! We are ruling and reigning over all we survey. Aren’t we?
Um, not so much.
The truth of the matter is this: As humans we are finite, and we cannot even see 1 minute into the future, let alone into eternity. We like to think we are so advanced and knowledgeable, powerful and wise; but the bible says that man’s wisdom is foolishness to God. But while Jesus in His mercy gives us a glimpse of eternity future based on our position in Him upon salvation, the fact is we cannot see ahead in life even one sorry minute. We are here on this earth for an appointed season either long or short, we don’t know which, during which time we are try to figure out how to live in this world, how to survive, and find our place both physically and spiritually. We are pulled daily by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, born into sin with an inability to help ourselves from the moment we are born. We are cursed to work the land and make it yield something useful, and after that we might get old and then depend on others at the end just as we did for the first part of our life. As Solomon said, ‘all is vanity’.
It’s not that we aren’t INTERESTED in our future; the occult and New Age revolve around forthtelling and prognosticating; astrology exists to provide a glimpse into the future; the news channels try to scare us all the time with what could happen in any given situation, TV commercials appeal to our fears and vanity; the weather channel is based solely on the premise of telling the future – and we wonder why people end up on medication because they have so much anxiety they can hardly function. Anxiety is simply the result of the mind telling itself over and over, ‘what if?’ What if I lose my job, what if my kids suffer harm; what if we can’t pay our bills, what if there is a war, what if I get a disease; and the list goes on and on. We know our limitations, alright, and we don’t care for it one bit and our stress levels are through the roof; we have many health issues today that bear this out.
But the truth is that worry is the opposite of faith, it is useless and contradicts a life of faith ; the only cure then is the life of trust. God is perfectly aware that we cannot see into the future and never will be able to, as it applies to day to day living. The Bible tells us, therefore, in Matthew 6:
25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin;
29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
This last verse I will come back to because it intrigues me from a heavenly perspective. And it reminds me of another verse, a companion passage of sorts, James 4:13-16 —
“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”;
14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”
16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”
Why? Because – SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY IS ITS OWN TROUBLE.
Those are strong words if we would presume to have any future days at all, and it is humbling at that. God knows we cannot see the future, he made us that way, and expects us to be mindful of such things. Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
There is a common thread of instruction that I am convinced if we take it to heart we will find it a lot easier to handle those ‘little did we know’s”. You know that saying, ‘take it one day at a time’? Well, that’s Biblical. The Lord is telling us that we need to measure our lives in 24 hour increments, and nothing greater than that, and that this is part of becoming wise; not that we cannot plan for the future and be good stewards with what we are given; there is nothing wrong with that. But when we do, it should be equally a part of our thinking that it may or may not happen, and the wise person says, ‘that’s OK, it’s up to the Lord to decide’, let His will be done. We need to be yielding our lives every day to His ability to see down the road. That is just being wise.
In light of these instructions, in light of our inability to see what’s ahead of us even for the rest of today, it’s still all good, and I want to now encourage you, and help lift you out of these human dilemmas by God’s grace because what we cannot do, when we are helpless to lift our own hands, He is more than able to do for us, and in fact DID for us in that while we were helpless sinners, He died for us.
If you get nothing more out of this short exhortation than to be reminded that you only need to live one 24-hour section at a time, and thereby increase your dependence on the Lord and have less anxiety in your life, I would say we have accomplished a lot. But there is a deeper dimension to all this.
Perhaps you have noticed that we are all subject to something called TIME.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, solar time, mean time, central time, eastern time, universal time, geologic time, medieval times, Father time – there seems to be no end of time, how to measure it, how to waste it, redeem it and otherwise lose it,
But there is a way to turn your concept of time on it’s ear and rise above the pull of the world to increasingly see things from a broader, comforting, and more heavenly perspective; and so I am going to challenge you and have some fun besides by taking a back road of sorts, and look at the concept of TIME. I don’t recall ever coming across a study on TIME and so we are going to look at it and see if we can glean some heavenly perspective, and put those pesky ‘little did we know’s’ in their place and get on with a life of trust and faith.
WHAT IS TIME?
The Bible speaks about segments of time quite a bit. Even though God is outside of time, we are bound by it. Genesis tells us God created it, morning and evening were defined that very first week of creation. Those verses I mentioned early on are only a few that mention days, but the Bible is loaded with references to weeks, months, years, lifetimes, and finally, eternity, which for all the world sounds to me like a measure of time in and of itself, just time that has no end.
Just think about it, how much the concept of time rules our lives. We are so bound to time that when we try to comprehend God having no beginning or end, we are quickly stopped in our mental tracks and are unable to wrap our brains around that because everything we know has a temporal quality except God. “Who created God?”, the atheists say; they cannot, in their finite, time-restricted understanding, accept the fact that God had no creator and has always been. As soon as you try to ponder the infinite your mind shuts down because you simply can’t go there any more than my dog can read a book. And speaking of dogs, do THEY feel the passage of time? If they do, they must be bored beyond belief, laying around all day and waiting for some human interaction.
What can we know about that elusive quality of TIME? We instinctively understand that time has a direction, or arrow, so to speak. If you were to see a film of someone pouring cream into their coffee, and they ran it backwards, you would immediately say, ‘wait a minute, that goes against my understanding of the ‘order of events’ when cream interacts with coffee.’ We cannot see time under a microscope nor can we change its properties; man is not mighty enough to do that.
If time is a dimension, as some believe, can we access different parts of it, move in and out of it? Actually, I can answer that up front: absolutely not; Ever see a time travel movie? That concept is inherently flawed, but it appeals to us humans because we know we cannot see the future and really desire to. But if we could go back to, say,1939 or so, knowing what we know in 2007, we could prevent a World War; prevent the Holocaust; this appeals to our desire to save the world, be in control; know something we were not given to know. It is a powerful, and some might say noble, thing to want to do. Now, the antichrist of the future will, as it says in Daniel, ‘seek to change times and seasons’ but we do not know what that means; it could be a demonic or occultic trick, spiritually speaking. But to play with time is to play God. The one way that man has found to play God with time is to continually change their estimate of the age of the earth to make a phony case for evolution and deceive many. This is a fairly recent charade and another Bible study altogether.
So what is time really?
I have been pondering this for some time. Years actually. My husband and I were going down the road recently, chatting about anything and everything, and I mentioned that I just couldn’t comprehend the idea of time, because I explained that no sooner were any words out of my mouth, they were in the past. It seems to me like the ‘present’ just doesn’t even exist because everything I do and think slips into the past virtually immediately. None of us can take back anything we have done or said, and we are all aware of the fact that as soon as something is out the mouth and into another set of ears, it is too late for change. Nevertheless, everything we have done or said was very real at one moment we said or felt it, and gone the next, and as my past fades into the fog more each day, my future will become clearer and more real with each passing moment. And my husband, a real peach of a man who has the patience of a saint and a godly explanation for every one of my “little did I know” moments these last 25 years, gave me a road-worthy explanation: He said, ‘see that van behind us that I just passed? It’s in ‘the past’. It’s behind us. Just as he said that, as if on cue, the van moved out of its lane and pulled up next to us. Tim said, ‘now, it’s ‘present’ with us – it is in our present. Then only seconds later, and I would have sworn he programmed that dumb van – it cut in front of us. Tim said, ‘see? It’s in our future. It’s in all three at once, it’s past, present and future”. And I just sat there, as confused as ever.
As I studied it this week, I realized why I was confused. Here we go.
Very early on in life, a child learns to ask, ‘what time is it?’
When we get older and concerned with the more profound issues of life, we ask, ‘what is time?’ Which is a much more complex question.
The Bible teaches us that God has set the boundaries for how we define time.
The earth rotates to make a day, the moon orbits the earth to make a month, the earth orbits the sun to make a year. God’s cycle of holy days and feasts in the OT are designed to map His program for redemption through a Messiah. For our convenience, we have clocks and calendars so we will be reminded of the brevity of life and think about the certainty of judgment to come. If I tried to make a list of all the Bible verse referencing time, we would be here ‘all day’.
Time is strange and fascinating, and subject to human interpretation.
For instance, when you are bored or wish to get out of a difficult situation, it is perceived to move very slowly. At the other extreme, joyous or busy times can be so packed with meaning that we are unaware that it has passed and we often say, ‘where DID the time go? When we sleep, or are in surgery, it is but a moment of time, but if you are watching the clock at 3 AM, it can be very frustrating.
In our Western thinking, scientific, mathematical and often unspiritual minds, we tend to view time as a framework to plan our lives, hold our days and months and years.
We tend to get out our day minders or organizers, and see a series of calendar blocks on a page, just waiting to be filled in with appointments and events, and the empty blocks mean we are ‘free’ and can do ‘what we want’ – that is OUR own personal segment of life that will not be subjected to couldas, wouldas, or shouldas. To the Western mind time is simply a framework or dimension that has a life of it’s own and we presume we have plenty of slots to fill or write in.
Another example is making those timelines like we did in school. You draw an arrow, left to right, and then a bunch of lines coming off of it, and then you write events and dates on those little lines to make note of what happened when.
A line of time might have a midpoint, and we write there, ‘the present’; the past stretches out to the left, and the future to the right. The present is somehow a dividing line between the two. We measure it, categorize it, make it linear, even though the rotation of the heavenly bodies is circular. We say, “if I only had more time”, or “I would rather be doing something else”, or we might say, “I have no quality time in my life”. We are in bondage to time, now more than ever, myself included.
As I studied this subject, I realized that I have been unknowingly looking at the commodity of time in a Greek/Roman, Western, scientific way that is completely foreign to the Biblical Hebrew way of looking at it. Let me explain.
If you have ever studied, even briefly, the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, you have found some very profound differences in how the Hebrew view of life, one quite foreign to us Gentiles, brings some subtle and not-so-subtle shades of meaning to our reading of the Scriptures. Not as pertaining to doctrine, because the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth. But there are cultural and experiential perspectives woven throughout the testaments that if we had a Jewish perspective on things we would find many verses to have a 3-dimensional aspect of them that we Westerners just do not get. Like certain references to ‘first-born’ sons in the Bible, or maybe certain phrases that we pass over that would be loaded with meaning if you lived in another time and place.
The same goes for the idea of time, and what the ancient Hebrews thought about it. Whether we realize it or not, much of our western thinking about most things, whether it pertains to ‘time’, or ‘psychology’, or spiritual matters, is heavily influenced by something called “Hellenism”. Hellenism is simply a way of thinking that began with the ancient Greeks and continued on in the Roman Empire. The ancient Greeks dominated the worldview with their language, literature, philosophy, politics, law, and art. I cannot overstate the influence that the Greeks had and continue to have on the known world that is diametrically opposed to the Jewish worldview. If you doubt their influence, just remember that our New Testament is translated from the Greek. Alexander the Great conquered the entire known ancient world. And because the Greeks exported their particularly secular view of life to the entire known world, that is why, when you study the Jewish roots of the faith, you will find that it is startlingly different than our own Western view.
In Greek philosophy, as I said earlier, “time” is a dimension, an object that we can measure, categorize, and fill, like a measuring cup you use in the kitchen. In the Hebrew way of thinking, time is simply the events of your life. Time to the Greeks is a medium that God works in; to the Jews it is the works themselves. Oh, I love that.
Western philosophers have all kinds of questions about time, and the Bible answers none of them because for the Jewish mind, time is nothing but the events of life. It has nothing to do with the ticks on the clock, but with the importance of the events of life. Good ‘times’, bad ‘times’, perilous ‘times’; to everything there is a ‘season’ – and he goes on to explain the various seasons of one’s life that include the experiences and people that make up every life.
Solomon doesn’t define time at all, he simply marks the passage of it with LIFE EVENTS. A Hebrew would never say, ‘I don’t have enough time’, because whatever he is doing is part of his time on earth, it is ALL important, it is ALL quality, it is ALL HOLY. This is the part of the Jewish mindset I find most lovely, most refreshing. Whatever they are doing, observant Jews do it as unto the Lord, and it is HOLY. They don’t see life as a series of choices of what to fill their days with, they don’t say, ‘well, I will cut this thing short so I can do what I want’, or the hedonistic mindset that lives for pleasure and seeks to fill all waking hours with whatever painless thing they prefer, NO. They see whatever they are doing as what is the thing to do. Their lives, and the events of their lives, is time itself.
You can see this in Scripture: REDEEM the time for the days are evil. OCCUPY till I come. Here is a perfect example: Go to the cemetary. Look at a gravestone, ANY gravestone. You will see a name, and then below it a date of birth, and a dash, and a date of death. That dash between the dates, is YOU. That is your life, the sum of who you were. Do you see that dash as a calendar filled with stuff of your own choosing, or do you see that dash as events, as life, as times and seasons? Of course it is the latter. That dash is who you were. That dash is the ultimate perspective of life, because if you see that dash as a calendar, you are missing the whole point. The Jews understood this; they seemed to view life from a much higher vantage point, from 10,000 feet; the Gentiles seem to want to look at it as the relentless tick-tock of the clock. I saw a movie several years back where the two main characters were discussing time; one said, “Time is a fire in which we burn” – in other words, it is bondage, a master, and we are its slave. The other character said, ‘I rather think of time as a companion that walks beside us and teaches us the value of life’. The latter definition is of course the Biblical one: “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”.
So, let’s follow one more train of thought, I don’t want to overwhelm you, and I know it’s hard to re-wire our minds to see the big picture, but it is very worthwhile to take some time and meditate on this in the days to come.
My last train of thought has to do with God’s relation to time. Think of a parade. You are sitting in your lawn chair in your town watching a parade. You see the floats in front of you and are into the moment. But if you were to go up into a helicopter and look down on the parade, you would see the whole picture; you would see the beginning, the middle, and the end. The reason my husband’s answer to my question of “What is time” was so confusing to me, is because I was looking for the Greek answer, a scientific and mathematical response; he gave me the heavenly perspecting, in effect saying that there is no present, except with God, he is in the ever-present. With God everything is in the present, He is outside of time as His existence does not consist of one moment following another. One more illustration for you:
Suppose I am writing a novel. I write this in my novel:
“Mary laid down her work. The next moment, there came a knock on her door.”
Mary lives in the time domain of the story I am writing about her. She cannot get out of that time domain, I put her there. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second half, I might sit down and think about Mary for 3 hours or so, or however long I want to. I can think about her as if she were the only character in the book for as long as I want, because I have all eternity to do that if I want. But that time I spent thinking about her does not appear in that book. I wrote half the sentence, and then got back to finishing it much later. But anyone reading about Mary would never know that. In the same way, God has infinite attention to spare each of us, and this is borne out in Scripture as it says that His thoughts toward us are as the sands of the sea.
If you must picture time as a line, then when pondering time, you must picture God as the page on which the line is drawn. Then we can see that for God it is 1920 and 2007 all at the same time. Cool, yes? This makes a lot of verses make sense that did not before, such as “the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world”. Wow, ponder that for a while.
Here is another mind-bender. Back in grade school we all had to take classes that had to do with parts of speech and verb tenses. Past tense, present, past imperfect, etc. I googled at least 18, and if you ever took a foreign language, you had to learn to conjugate verbs. Awful wretched stuff. In Hebrew, there are only technically two tenses. Perfect, meaning it is past and done, and imperfect, meaning it will happen in the future. I HAVE done it, I WILL do it. I like that very much. But in ancient Hebrew there is one more. It is called PROPHETIC PERFECT. Unfortunately, when the Bible was translated into English, scholars thought our western minds could not grasp the concept so they put some verses into the future tense that should have been in the past perfect and so we miss out on some pretty cool stuff. If the perfect tense means past and done with, then the PROPHETIC PERFECT means ‘still to happen in the future, but to God it is already done.’ Wow. Let’s find some examples, and there are several.
Genesis 6: God told Noah to build the ark. After telling him how to build it, the Hebrew text reads that God said, “and you HAVE COME into the ark.” but it wasn’t even built yet. Most English versions say, ‘and you will enter the ark’.
Genesis 15: The Hebrew text says, ‘to your descendents I have given this land’ – but this promise was made before Abraham had any descendents to give the land to.
Numbers 24: The Hebrew says, ‘A star has come forth out of Jacob and a scepter has arisen out of Israel’ as though the Messiah had already come, so English versions use the future tense here as well.
Here is a mixed verse: Psalm 45:7 says, “You have loved righteousness and hate wickedness”. This verse was written about 1000 years before His birth; He has always loved righteousness, but his judgment of wickedness is YET future and the original Hebrew reflects this.
Now, take another look at Bible prophecy. Us “little did we knows” can’t see one minute in front of us. But we serve a God who CAN. What a gift He gives us, whom he calls His own, to tell us the end from the beginning. What an awesome thing that He would consider us and desire to tell us what His plans are.
Where will you be in 100 years? Now that you have answered that (I can read your mind on this one)
let go of the things that won’t matter then and concentrate on the things that WILL.
Like all that eternal stuff.
Teach Us To Number Our Days
Just a few of the ways that humans try and see into the future. Try to take on that which only God is able to do. But, we are masters of our universe! We are ruling and reigning over all we survey. Aren’t we?
Um, not so much.
The truth of the matter is this: As humans we are finite, and we cannot even see 1 minute into the future, let alone into eternity. We like to think we are so advanced and knowledgeable, powerful and wise; but the bible says that man’s wisdom is foolishness to God. But while Jesus in His mercy gives us a glimpse of eternity future based on our position in Him upon salvation, the fact is we cannot see ahead in life even one sorry minute. We are here on this earth for an appointed season either long or short, we don’t know which, during which time we are try to figure out how to live in this world, how to survive, and find our place both physically and spiritually. We are pulled daily by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, born into sin with an inability to help ourselves from the moment we are born. We are cursed to work the land and make it yield something useful, and after that we might get old and then depend on others at the end just as we did for the first part of our life. As Solomon said, ‘all is vanity’.
It’s not that we aren’t INTERESTED in our future; the occult and New Age revolve around forthtelling and prognosticating; astrology exists to provide a glimpse into the future; the news channels try to scare us all the time with what could happen in any given situation, TV commercials appeal to our fears and vanity; the weather channel is based solely on the premise of telling the future – and we wonder why people end up on medication because they have so much anxiety they can hardly function. Anxiety is simply the result of the mind telling itself over and over, ‘what if?’ What if I lose my job, what if my kids suffer harm; what if we can’t pay our bills, what if there is a war, what if I get a disease; and the list goes on and on. We know our limitations, alright, and we don’t care for it one bit and our stress levels are through the roof; we have many health issues today that bear this out.
But the truth is that worry is the opposite of faith, it is useless and contradicts a life of faith ; the only cure then is the life of trust. God is perfectly aware that we cannot see into the future and never will be able to, as it applies to day to day living. The Bible tells us, therefore, in Matthew 6:
25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin;
29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
This last verse I will come back to because it intrigues me from a heavenly perspective. And it reminds me of another verse, a companion passage of sorts, James 4:13-16 —
“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”;
14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”
16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”
Why? Because – SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY IS ITS OWN TROUBLE.
Those are strong words if we would presume to have any future days at all, and it is humbling at that. God knows we cannot see the future, he made us that way, and expects us to be mindful of such things. Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
There is a common thread of instruction that I am convinced if we take it to heart we will find it a lot easier to handle those ‘little did we know’s”. You know that saying, ‘take it one day at a time’? Well, that’s Biblical. The Lord is telling us that we need to measure our lives in 24 hour increments, and nothing greater than that, and that this is part of becoming wise; not that we cannot plan for the future and be good stewards with what we are given; there is nothing wrong with that. But when we do, it should be equally a part of our thinking that it may or may not happen, and the wise person says, ‘that’s OK, it’s up to the Lord to decide’, let His will be done. We need to be yielding our lives every day to His ability to see down the road. That is just being wise.
In light of these instructions, in light of our inability to see what’s ahead of us even for the rest of today, it’s still all good, and I want to now encourage you, and help lift you out of these human dilemmas by God’s grace because what we cannot do, when we are helpless to lift our own hands, He is more than able to do for us, and in fact DID for us in that while we were helpless sinners, He died for us.
If you get nothing more out of this short exhortation than to be reminded that you only need to live one 24-hour section at a time, and thereby increase your dependence on the Lord and have less anxiety in your life, I would say we have accomplished a lot. But there is a deeper dimension to all this.
Perhaps you have noticed that we are all subject to something called TIME.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, solar time, mean time, central time, eastern time, universal time, geologic time, medieval times, Father time – there seems to be no end of time, how to measure it, how to waste it, redeem it and otherwise lose it,
But there is a way to turn your concept of time on it’s ear and rise above the pull of the world to increasingly see things from a broader, comforting, and more heavenly perspective; and so I am going to challenge you and have some fun besides by taking a back road of sorts, and look at the concept of TIME. I don’t recall ever coming across a study on TIME and so we are going to look at it and see if we can glean some heavenly perspective, and put those pesky ‘little did we know’s’ in their place and get on with a life of trust and faith.
WHAT IS TIME?
The Bible speaks about segments of time quite a bit. Even though God is outside of time, we are bound by it. Genesis tells us God created it, morning and evening were defined that very first week of creation. Those verses I mentioned early on are only a few that mention days, but the Bible is loaded with references to weeks, months, years, lifetimes, and finally, eternity, which for all the world sounds to me like a measure of time in and of itself, just time that has no end.
Just think about it, how much the concept of time rules our lives. We are so bound to time that when we try to comprehend God having no beginning or end, we are quickly stopped in our mental tracks and are unable to wrap our brains around that because everything we know has a temporal quality except God. “Who created God?”, the atheists say; they cannot, in their finite, time-restricted understanding, accept the fact that God had no creator and has always been. As soon as you try to ponder the infinite your mind shuts down because you simply can’t go there any more than my dog can read a book. And speaking of dogs, do THEY feel the passage of time? If they do, they must be bored beyond belief, laying around all day and waiting for some human interaction.
What can we know about that elusive quality of TIME? We instinctively understand that time has a direction, or arrow, so to speak. If you were to see a film of someone pouring cream into their coffee, and they ran it backwards, you would immediately say, ‘wait a minute, that goes against my understanding of the ‘order of events’ when cream interacts with coffee.’ We cannot see time under a microscope nor can we change its properties; man is not mighty enough to do that.
If time is a dimension, as some believe, can we access different parts of it, move in and out of it? Actually, I can answer that up front: absolutely not; Ever see a time travel movie? That concept is inherently flawed, but it appeals to us humans because we know we cannot see the future and really desire to. But if we could go back to, say,1939 or so, knowing what we know in 2007, we could prevent a World War; prevent the Holocaust; this appeals to our desire to save the world, be in control; know something we were not given to know. It is a powerful, and some might say noble, thing to want to do. Now, the antichrist of the future will, as it says in Daniel, ‘seek to change times and seasons’ but we do not know what that means; it could be a demonic or occultic trick, spiritually speaking. But to play with time is to play God. The one way that man has found to play God with time is to continually change their estimate of the age of the earth to make a phony case for evolution and deceive many. This is a fairly recent charade and another Bible study altogether.
So what is time really?
I have been pondering this for some time. Years actually. My husband and I were going down the road recently, chatting about anything and everything, and I mentioned that I just couldn’t comprehend the idea of time, because I explained that no sooner were any words out of my mouth, they were in the past. It seems to me like the ‘present’ just doesn’t even exist because everything I do and think slips into the past virtually immediately. None of us can take back anything we have done or said, and we are all aware of the fact that as soon as something is out the mouth and into another set of ears, it is too late for change. Nevertheless, everything we have done or said was very real at one moment we said or felt it, and gone the next, and as my past fades into the fog more each day, my future will become clearer and more real with each passing moment. And my husband, a real peach of a man who has the patience of a saint and a godly explanation for every one of my “little did I know” moments these last 25 years, gave me a road-worthy explanation: He said, ‘see that van behind us that I just passed? It’s in ‘the past’. It’s behind us. Just as he said that, as if on cue, the van moved out of its lane and pulled up next to us. Tim said, ‘now, it’s ‘present’ with us – it is in our present. Then only seconds later, and I would have sworn he programmed that dumb van – it cut in front of us. Tim said, ‘see? It’s in our future. It’s in all three at once, it’s past, present and future”. And I just sat there, as confused as ever.
As I studied it this week, I realized why I was confused. Here we go.
Very early on in life, a child learns to ask, ‘what time is it?’
When we get older and concerned with the more profound issues of life, we ask, ‘what is time?’ Which is a much more complex question.
The Bible teaches us that God has set the boundaries for how we define time.
The earth rotates to make a day, the moon orbits the earth to make a month, the earth orbits the sun to make a year. God’s cycle of holy days and feasts in the OT are designed to map His program for redemption through a Messiah. For our convenience, we have clocks and calendars so we will be reminded of the brevity of life and think about the certainty of judgment to come. If I tried to make a list of all the Bible verse referencing time, we would be here ‘all day’.
Time is strange and fascinating, and subject to human interpretation.
For instance, when you are bored or wish to get out of a difficult situation, it is perceived to move very slowly. At the other extreme, joyous or busy times can be so packed with meaning that we are unaware that it has passed and we often say, ‘where DID the time go? When we sleep, or are in surgery, it is but a moment of time, but if you are watching the clock at 3 AM, it can be very frustrating.
In our Western thinking, scientific, mathematical and often unspiritual minds, we tend to view time as a framework to plan our lives, hold our days and months and years.
We tend to get out our day minders or organizers, and see a series of calendar blocks on a page, just waiting to be filled in with appointments and events, and the empty blocks mean we are ‘free’ and can do ‘what we want’ – that is OUR own personal segment of life that will not be subjected to couldas, wouldas, or shouldas. To the Western mind time is simply a framework or dimension that has a life of it’s own and we presume we have plenty of slots to fill or write in.
Another example is making those timelines like we did in school. You draw an arrow, left to right, and then a bunch of lines coming off of it, and then you write events and dates on those little lines to make note of what happened when.
A line of time might have a midpoint, and we write there, ‘the present’; the past stretches out to the left, and the future to the right. The present is somehow a dividing line between the two. We measure it, categorize it, make it linear, even though the rotation of the heavenly bodies is circular. We say, “if I only had more time”, or “I would rather be doing something else”, or we might say, “I have no quality time in my life”. We are in bondage to time, now more than ever, myself included.
As I studied this subject, I realized that I have been unknowingly looking at the commodity of time in a Greek/Roman, Western, scientific way that is completely foreign to the Biblical Hebrew way of looking at it. Let me explain.
If you have ever studied, even briefly, the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, you have found some very profound differences in how the Hebrew view of life, one quite foreign to us Gentiles, brings some subtle and not-so-subtle shades of meaning to our reading of the Scriptures. Not as pertaining to doctrine, because the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth. But there are cultural and experiential perspectives woven throughout the testaments that if we had a Jewish perspective on things we would find many verses to have a 3-dimensional aspect of them that we Westerners just do not get. Like certain references to ‘first-born’ sons in the Bible, or maybe certain phrases that we pass over that would be loaded with meaning if you lived in another time and place.
The same goes for the idea of time, and what the ancient Hebrews thought about it. Whether we realize it or not, much of our western thinking about most things, whether it pertains to ‘time’, or ‘psychology’, or spiritual matters, is heavily influenced by something called “Hellenism”. Hellenism is simply a way of thinking that began with the ancient Greeks and continued on in the Roman Empire. The ancient Greeks dominated the worldview with their language, literature, philosophy, politics, law, and art. I cannot overstate the influence that the Greeks had and continue to have on the known world that is diametrically opposed to the Jewish worldview. If you doubt their influence, just remember that our New Testament is translated from the Greek. Alexander the Great conquered the entire known ancient world. And because the Greeks exported their particularly secular view of life to the entire known world, that is why, when you study the Jewish roots of the faith, you will find that it is startlingly different than our own Western view.
In Greek philosophy, as I said earlier, “time” is a dimension, an object that we can measure, categorize, and fill, like a measuring cup you use in the kitchen. In the Hebrew way of thinking, time is simply the events of your life. Time to the Greeks is a medium that God works in; to the Jews it is the works themselves. Oh, I love that.
Western philosophers have all kinds of questions about time, and the Bible answers none of them because for the Jewish mind, time is nothing but the events of life. It has nothing to do with the ticks on the clock, but with the importance of the events of life. Good ‘times’, bad ‘times’, perilous ‘times’; to everything there is a ‘season’ – and he goes on to explain the various seasons of one’s life that include the experiences and people that make up every life.
Solomon doesn’t define time at all, he simply marks the passage of it with LIFE EVENTS. A Hebrew would never say, ‘I don’t have enough time’, because whatever he is doing is part of his time on earth, it is ALL important, it is ALL quality, it is ALL HOLY. This is the part of the Jewish mindset I find most lovely, most refreshing. Whatever they are doing, observant Jews do it as unto the Lord, and it is HOLY. They don’t see life as a series of choices of what to fill their days with, they don’t say, ‘well, I will cut this thing short so I can do what I want’, or the hedonistic mindset that lives for pleasure and seeks to fill all waking hours with whatever painless thing they prefer, NO. They see whatever they are doing as what is the thing to do. Their lives, and the events of their lives, is time itself.
You can see this in Scripture: REDEEM the time for the days are evil. OCCUPY till I come. Here is a perfect example: Go to the cemetary. Look at a gravestone, ANY gravestone. You will see a name, and then below it a date of birth, and a dash, and a date of death. That dash between the dates, is YOU. That is your life, the sum of who you were. Do you see that dash as a calendar filled with stuff of your own choosing, or do you see that dash as events, as life, as times and seasons? Of course it is the latter. That dash is who you were. That dash is the ultimate perspective of life, because if you see that dash as a calendar, you are missing the whole point. The Jews understood this; they seemed to view life from a much higher vantage point, from 10,000 feet; the Gentiles seem to want to look at it as the relentless tick-tock of the clock. I saw a movie several years back where the two main characters were discussing time; one said, “Time is a fire in which we burn” – in other words, it is bondage, a master, and we are its slave. The other character said, ‘I rather think of time as a companion that walks beside us and teaches us the value of life’. The latter definition is of course the Biblical one: “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”.
So, let’s follow one more train of thought, I don’t want to overwhelm you, and I know it’s hard to re-wire our minds to see the big picture, but it is very worthwhile to take some time and meditate on this in the days to come.
My last train of thought has to do with God’s relation to time. Think of a parade. You are sitting in your lawn chair in your town watching a parade. You see the floats in front of you and are into the moment. But if you were to go up into a helicopter and look down on the parade, you would see the whole picture; you would see the beginning, the middle, and the end. The reason my husband’s answer to my question of “What is time” was so confusing to me, is because I was looking for the Greek answer, a scientific and mathematical response; he gave me the heavenly perspecting, in effect saying that there is no present, except with God, he is in the ever-present. With God everything is in the present, He is outside of time as His existence does not consist of one moment following another. One more illustration for you:
Suppose I am writing a novel. I write this in my novel:
“Mary laid down her work. The next moment, there came a knock on her door.”
Mary lives in the time domain of the story I am writing about her. She cannot get out of that time domain, I put her there. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second half, I might sit down and think about Mary for 3 hours or so, or however long I want to. I can think about her as if she were the only character in the book for as long as I want, because I have all eternity to do that if I want. But that time I spent thinking about her does not appear in that book. I wrote half the sentence, and then got back to finishing it much later. But anyone reading about Mary would never know that. In the same way, God has infinite attention to spare each of us, and this is borne out in Scripture as it says that His thoughts toward us are as the sands of the sea.
If you must picture time as a line, then when pondering time, you must picture God as the page on which the line is drawn. Then we can see that for God it is 1920 and 2007 all at the same time. Cool, yes? This makes a lot of verses make sense that did not before, such as “the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world”. Wow, ponder that for a while.
Here is another mind-bender. Back in grade school we all had to take classes that had to do with parts of speech and verb tenses. Past tense, present, past imperfect, etc. I googled at least 18, and if you ever took a foreign language, you had to learn to conjugate verbs. Awful wretched stuff. In Hebrew, there are only technically two tenses. Perfect, meaning it is past and done, and imperfect, meaning it will happen in the future. I HAVE done it, I WILL do it. I like that very much. But in ancient Hebrew there is one more. It is called PROPHETIC PERFECT. Unfortunately, when the Bible was translated into English, scholars thought our western minds could not grasp the concept so they put some verses into the future tense that should have been in the past perfect and so we miss out on some pretty cool stuff. If the perfect tense means past and done with, then the PROPHETIC PERFECT means ‘still to happen in the future, but to God it is already done.’ Wow. Let’s find some examples, and there are several.
Genesis 6: God told Noah to build the ark. After telling him how to build it, the Hebrew text reads that God said, “and you HAVE COME into the ark.” but it wasn’t even built yet. Most English versions say, ‘and you will enter the ark’.
Genesis 15: The Hebrew text says, ‘to your descendents I have given this land’ – but this promise was made before Abraham had any descendents to give the land to.
Numbers 24: The Hebrew says, ‘A star has come forth out of Jacob and a scepter has arisen out of Israel’ as though the Messiah had already come, so English versions use the future tense here as well.
Here is a mixed verse: Psalm 45:7 says, “You have loved righteousness and hate wickedness”. This verse was written about 1000 years before His birth; He has always loved righteousness, but his judgment of wickedness is YET future and the original Hebrew reflects this.
Now, take another look at Bible prophecy. Us “little did we knows” can’t see one minute in front of us. But we serve a God who CAN. What a gift He gives us, whom he calls His own, to tell us the end from the beginning. What an awesome thing that He would consider us and desire to tell us what His plans are.
Where will you be in 100 years? Now that you have answered that (I can read your mind on this one)
let go of the things that won’t matter then and concentrate on the things that WILL.
Like all that eternal stuff.
About Mary
I have been a believer since 1981. Everything else before that is relatively meaningless. My heart has, from day 1, always been toward the subject of bible prophecy and I have seen the Lord do amazing things in my life through simply studying the Word and applying it to my life. I am a wife, grandmother and work full time in ministry. Life is full, and full of learning curves and seasons.